


Book of Days

by JessaLRynn



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dimension Cannon, Dimension Travel, F/M, Introspection, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6027058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the beginning of love, curled and sleeping within their breasts.  They can be the home it will make for itself, for forever. </p><p>First, they will have to rebuild the places where it lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Book of Days

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a ficathon over at Then_Theres_Us (Challenge 53)

**_The Day After Tomorrow..._ **

-They're standing on that shore hand-in-hand, and they look as if they've never parted, as if they never will.

-Jackie takes a picture of them there with her mobile phone. They don't see it for years to come.

-The whispers they exchange would make no sense to anyone else in any Universe. 

-What he whispers is a secret they will both carry forever. What she says is, "Thank you for saving me."

-He'll understand that very soon.

-It isn't the Doctor's secret wish. He had two dreams, so utterly inseparable in his mind that one moment's miracle brings the pair true at once, thereby negating both of them.

-This is a whole new twist, though, on lying to yourself.

-It isn't Rose's dream come true. She made her choice a long time ago. She's never leaving him, not even now. 

-There's nothing she won't do if he asks... even let him go away again.

-It's Jackie Tyler's fairy tale, her childhood happily ever after, once and for all.

-They're going to have to come to terms with that.

-This is the beginning of love, curled and sleeping within their breasts. They can be the home it will make for itself, for forever. 

-First, they will have to rebuild the places where it lives.

**

**_Yesterday..._ **

-Before the stars are even visibly going out, aliens and Earth scientists alike have traced the roots of the tragedy to the Universal integrity glitches in and around London.

-They rule out the departure of the Cybers because they have no choice: if they are the cause, then the Universe is doomed, and there's no use giving up yet.

-The one thing they can't rule out is hosting the argument, leaning on the table and forcing the brainstorming session. When someone mentions her, she writes it down as calmly as anything else.

-The Universe is dying of some sort of star-eating cancer. When they propose plans to get rid of the source, the device they propose hasn't got the slightest trace of kindness to it.

-Cannons aren't for subtlety - they're for smashing through things.

-It's only after the fourth agonizing trip (and the fourth equally painful bounce back) that Rose suggests they actually aim it toward something. 

-She suggests finding the Doctor as the goal. That way, if this plan fails, there's the best backup plan for saving Universes, right there. 

-He can't save relationships or himself, but anything physically bigger than a breadbox, that's got real potential. She knows she's hopeless, because she finds it oddly endearing. In an infuriating sort of way, of course.

-Jackie Tyler is told nothing.

-The new configurations on the Dimension Cannon are a work of skill and efficiency, the scientific genius and technology of thirty-six different worlds. No expense of any kind is spared.

-It still takes a small key to prime it correctly. Rose turns that key without any sign of remorse.

-The inhabitants have delivered their verdict: Pete's Universe has rejected her. The weight of her steps upon the Earth pulls distant stars from the sky to testify. It is time for her to go. 

-She tries to tell herself that she's made the right choice, making it easy for them to do this, even if she does end up in the Void.

-One of the Doctor's greatest strengths is in lying convincingly to himself. Another is that he's highly contagious.

-As they push the big red threatening button to jettison her from a Universe where she is not allowed to live, it occurs to Rose that the Doctor might find this impressive.

-She concentrates on him. It's all she has to cling to, when even two entire realities have thrown her out.

 

**

_**Forever...** _

"I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, and I scatter them, a message to lead myself here."

**

**_Today..._ **

-There's a king of the Earth in this Universe. Rose, granted audience with him, has to leave again almost immediately. His aura of presence feels odd to her, familiar and strange at once. King Alistair the Great pronounces her mad-eyed and made of gold. Before the jump takes her, Rose has to agree that one of them is mad, anyway.

-Wrong Universes smell odd. That's the way they register in Rose's senses, though she knows that's not exactly what she truly feels. The words aren't there, though, for the real sensation. Rose resigns herself to calling it smell, until she learns a better word.

-In this Universe, she meets Mickrick, no last name, the right hand man of the War Lord of East London. Jumping Universes, and she's still learning more about the people she's always known.

-In this Universe, Jackie Prentice has her own line of hair style products, and does commercials for them with talk show hosts. She enthuses constantly about the entrepreneurial spirit. Case in point, Rose thinks, and falls away.

-It seems to be a junkyard in London and it smells right. The taste of it is wrong, though, sort of tingly and like toasted sugar. She shakes her head at the mystery her own senses have become to her, and resolves to think about it as soon as she has the time. 

-The stars are going out everywhere, now.

-In the Universe she was born in, she's on a planet as far from the Earth as she can possibly be while still staying in technically the same galaxy. The creatures on the planet are all shaped like giant potatoes in her opinion, but she doesn't really have time to think about that. They're after her faster than she can say 'armed and dangerous', and she spends the next hour hiding and desperately afraid. She's absolutely certain a spear passes right through her as she fades away. The pain, however, might just be all in her mind. Might. 

-She's back in Pete's World (it smells like the original Universe and a touch of cinnamon). It's here of all places that it finally occurs to her that her separation from the Doctor has made her aware of something she is almost certain she always knew. Air has only ever smelt right to her in two places - home, and the TARDIS.

-So only home, then.

-In her right Universe, but definitely the wrong time, there's a boy in pajamas pressing buttons frantically in the cockpit of a spaceship. "I think it's too late," he says. Rose looks up to the viewer and gets the most rapidly expanding view of the ground that she's ever seen. Before panic can set in, she snatches the child, jumps. He's torn from her grasp (or she is) and the Universe screams fire through her. She couldn't save him, didn't save him, never saved him, or maybe she did, but he's gone (or she is). She'll never know and it hurts so much, she feels for awhile like she's nothing but ache.

-She meets Donna Noble in the wrong Universe. In several wrong Universes, in fact.

-She meets Fred Astaire in an even wronger Universe, where everyone has long since been digitized. She remembers the Doctor claiming something like that once. At the time, she'd thought he was being ridiculous. Now, she wonders if it might be reality that's ridiculous.

-In a slightly sideways Universe, she tries to save Shireen from becoming, well, Shireen.

-In the Universe after that, Mickey and Shireen are happily married, have been since seventeen. They've three kids and, because she's out of time, eleven grandkids. 

-In the next one, he's married to a doctor called Martha. He's Lord Mayor of London. Rose is more than a little proud of that.

-In a Universe full of war, she destroys the Earth. She meant to do it this time. It still hurts more.

-In Pete's World, Jackie and Pete Tyler had everything they ever wanted, because they did not have a child. Rose lives still with a measure of guilt she's never been able to explain.

-There's a Universe where everything seems perfectly normal, exactly like home. She's been traveling too long, becoming too alien. It takes her fully ten minutes to realize that the people inhabiting this perfectly human earth are actually some breed of reptile.

-In this Universe, Pete dies at seven from Leukemia.

-In the next, he dies at twenty, in a car crash.

-In the next, what happens to him is unspeakable, but he still dies childless.

-She's met some variation of Mickey in at least twenty different Universes. Some form of Jackie, Pete, Shireen, and dozens of other people she's known turn up from time to time, turn up everywhere. There's only one Doctor. Apparently, there's also only one Jack.

-Turns out, there's only one Rose, too.

-She can see all of time and space, everything that is, was, or ever could be. It doesn't drive her mad. She almost wishes it would.

-The moment she arrives, there is screaming from the burning village, and from the basket next to the woman's body at her feet. Rose looks around hastily, trying to get her bearings, and knows only that she's in her own Universe again. There's an angry mob just out of reach and no time to think, so she snatches the terrified child, dives into the water, and swims for their lives. Their pursuers are determined, but not brave enough to venture into the rushing current. Rose wades out the other side to encouragement from a cheering crowd. Every nerve in her body is protesting.

-She almost thinks about keeping the little girl, about staying here and now and waiting. Every sense she can't explain shrieks and rails against. She wonders if the odd physics will let her, and doubts it. So she takes the baby to an orphanage. Before they'll let her leave, they ask Rose for the child's name. While she tries to think up the feminine of Moses, it comes to her, not what she was looking for, but the location marker that was Rose's first sight upon arrival here. She smiles and turns on her heel, and her senses are still screaming warning bells. "Name her for that river of yours," she says. "Call her River Song."

-Here, the skies are burning, cities are singing and the seas are asleep. People made of smoke dream of rivers and the rivers dream back at them. Also, the tea is getting cold. Rose walks down a flight of steps made of clouds, only to discover that her feet will not touch the ground. 

-Somewhere, she is painted in a mural with her eyes on the stars and her clothes made of light.

-Somewhere, she is the Incarnation of Evil.

-Somewhere, she is following some sense that the Doctor must be here, in the very next place she looks.

-Her heart is hanging on to itself, all threads and patches, and time is something she eats on her breakfast cereal and smells on the wind and combs through her hair. If he is the Lord of Time, then she will wear it with everything, and breathe it and dine on it, and drink it down, and bathe in it, all to be closer to him. 

-She can touch it because it cannot touch her.

-She does all this for love, love of the man she created herself for, and love of what she created.

-She meets Donna Noble in the right Universe. Time screams and won't stop screaming, and the Universe abruptly smells like patchouli incense. Something isn't right. Or, rather, Rose may be the only thing that isn't wrong.

-She finds him at last. She's two minutes too late. 

**

_**Forever...** _

"I bring life..."

**

_**Tomorrow...** _

-Donna Noble is everywhere because Donna Noble is everything. 

-Rose know what it's like to have the entire Universe balancing on your shoulders. And Donna's shoulders are already unfortunately occupied.

-She builds a time machine from smoke and mirrors because someone must.

-Everything else she does because she can, because someone has to be the Doctor, because if his spark has gone out of the Universe, of all Universes, then they're all doomed.

-She was the one who could have saved him all along, but this is nothing like what she would have thought. No white chargers for her, not even sudden moments of brilliance. Rather, it's the same way she's always done it - with a death.

-It's the second time she's kneeling next to a car accident that saved the world, and she's got a much bigger secret to tell this time.

-This is the power that is hers, the power that will always reside within her soul: She is part of time itself, and she will be ruled by neither it nor its Lord.

-He will send her away again. He will always send her away. And sooner or later, she will come back. Until then, there will be no tears, no regrets.

-She knows him, his hearts and his name, and who he is on the inside. She knows that he can break her heart, and will, but not before he breaks his own as well.

**

_**Forever...** _

"I want you safe. My Doctor."


End file.
